The reason for smaller pensions and so on aren't internal factors alone.
Often the fact is that some nation abroad can salary and staff workers, with fewer regulations, more health risks, lower costs and almost equivalent products.
If you mandated that most workers work only 40 hours per week, be cognizant that many companies would just throw in the towel. (And now you have two problems.)
This was the thesis of the original blog post. What do you do with a world or nation where 95% of the jobs are uneconomical to perform locally?
When job growth is no longer linked to the economy, how do you employ people?
Honestly the hard answer is "bring the standard of living around the world to the same level". Arguably the easiest way to do this is to lower your own.
The easy answer is to tax the wealthy. All that money generated through economic growth ends up somewhere. This is in fact what the the g20 are working on right now by developing a global tax on financial transactions.
Update: reflecting on this a bit more, if capital now is more economically useful than labor, this just means that 'jobs' have shifted from labor to capital. Instead of building a tax base on top of the labor force, we would need to build one on top of the capital force. It's quite unlikely that this can be done though.
Finally someone states the obvious. Find a way to globally tax all this profit. Take that tax money and use it to create free education, health care and much earlier social security. Devote tax money to public transit, research institutes, recreation. In short realize that all this capital growth should be used for something good.
Good luck with that "global" tax on financial transactions; there are numerous markets in second-tier countries which see this as an excellent competitive advantage, and those countries are motivated to resist pressure to implement the tax due to past histories of humiliation and exploitation by developed countries. The wealthy have a much higher ability to rearrange their lives and businesses to avoid taxes than average people, just ask Eduardo Saverin. As a practical proposal, taxing the wealthy is likely to result in a much less significant result than you would expect.
I don't think this is true. Will stock trading move to senegal because the NYSE has a per-trade tax? Will the rich move to chile because they're taxed less there? Wealthy people still have to live inside the system, they ony escape heavier taxation because they're allowed to.
>When job growth is no longer linked to the economy, how do you employ people?
Better yet, when job growth is no longer linked to the economy why do you employ people? At some point we will reach a point where there just isn't any real reason for most people to work. They won't be qualified for the work there is left to do and resources won't be scarce enough that we need an artificial determining factor like salary to decide who gets them.
Everyone devoting 40+ hours of their week to earning a living won't be a requirement forever so at some point humanity will need to think about that.
If by "throw in the towel" you mean "work diligently to find ways to replace workers with technology in order to remain profitable," then I fully agree with you. Heaping more burden on employers simply accelerates the process. It's all going to the same place in the end, so we're just talking about adjustments to the rate at which we get there anyway.
Often the fact is that some nation abroad can salary and staff workers, with fewer regulations, more health risks, lower costs and almost equivalent products.
If you mandated that most workers work only 40 hours per week, be cognizant that many companies would just throw in the towel. (And now you have two problems.)
This was the thesis of the original blog post. What do you do with a world or nation where 95% of the jobs are uneconomical to perform locally?
When job growth is no longer linked to the economy, how do you employ people?
Honestly the hard answer is "bring the standard of living around the world to the same level". Arguably the easiest way to do this is to lower your own.